Harrison, Poised for Expansion, Awash in Blueprints

Bremerton: The hospital on Cherry Avenue in East Bremerton is undergoing a renovation to convert most of its patient quarters into private, single-occupancy rooms. The conversion will be complete in late 2011 or early 2012.

Silverdale: Harrison is proposing a multistory building on the same site as its facility at Myhre Road and Ridgetop Boulevard. It would expand the services to be a full-service hospital opening in 2011.

Port Orchard: The clinic and urgent care center is undergoing an expansion that will more than double its size to 68,000 square feet in January 2009. It will go from being open 12 hours daily to 24 hours.

Belfair: New 7,300-square-foot clinic under construction at Highway 3 and Romance Hill Road will house primary-care offices and a 12-hour-a-day urgent care center. Slated to open in early 2009, it will also contain offices and meeting space for Mason County's Public Hospital District No. 2.

Poulsbo: An outpatient cancer center with radiation therapy is under consideration, potentially in a medical complex planned off Highway 305, just north of Poulsbo Village.

The wall of drawers in his office can't hold everything Douglas Coover has going these days. The director of campus design and construction at Harrison Medical Center puts current project files in a rolling cart within arm's reach. He's too busy to have to rummage deeper.

Kitsap County's largest private employer is undergoing a building boom that will extend its presence up, down and across the peninsula over the next three years. From Belfair to Silverdale, Port Orchard to Poulsbo, Harrison is expanding services, opening new clinics and considering new facilities.

"That's only the tip of the iceberg," Coover said, hinting that Harrison's latest master plan, due out this summer, will reveal more plans still.

The growth is driven by population increases in Kitsap, changing demographics and rising standards for hospital care. Harrison is also recognizing that its single full-service hospital on Cherry Avenue in East Bremerton, far from the main highway, is no longer conveniently accessible.

"It is tucked away," Coover acknowledged. When the facility on Cherry Avenue opened in 1965, its location off Highway 303 was in the urban epicenter, he said. Today, the main transportation corridor is several miles to the west along Highway 3.

"The patterns of where people work, live and play (have shifted)," said Tom Kruse, Harrison's vice president of strategy and business development. "We're becoming a much more densely populated county instead of having a true central hub. In order to meet the needs, we have to have (services) much more closely located to where people are."

The biggest project in the offing is a $125 million expansion of Harrison's campus in Silverdale. The medical center opened a

maternity and children's hospital with emergency department and outpatient surgery services in 2000 at Myhre Road and Ridgetop Boulevard, near the junction of Highways 3 and 303. Now it is looking at building a separate full-service hospital on the same site.

The expansion would enable Harrison to divide its acute-care services roughly equally between Bremerton and Silverdale.

At the moment, Kruse said, Silverdale has 44 beds, all for women and children, plus a 14-bed emergency department. When the project is completed — in late 2011 or early 2012 if all goes as planned — Silverdale would have 125 to 145 beds in all, including an enlarged emergency room, an intensive care unit and new patient rooms, all of them private.

Shifting some beds to Silverdale would then allow Harrison to convert patient rooms in Bremerton to all-private, as well — a recent trend in the hospital industry compelled by requirements for patient privacy and infection control.

Harrison also wants to make its facilities more pleasant for patients and their visitors, bringing rooms up to what Coover calls

"hospitality level." Drawings of four suites recently built in the radiation oncology center in Bremerton show rooms resembling motel or hotel quarters, except for the institutional beds.

Kruse noted that although private rooms will become the norm, the hospital might need to double-up patients when the census is high.

"During flu season, all bets are off," he said.

In Port Orchard, construction is under way on an expansion of a clinic and urgent-care center Harrison opened there in 1995. When it's finished in January, the complex will be more than twice its current size, and the urgent-care center will stay open round-the-clock.

Farther south, in Belfair, Harrison is under contract with Public Hospital District No. 2 in Mason County to operate a clinic being

built off Highway 3 at Romance Hill Road.

At the other end of the peninsula, Harrison is contemplating opening a cancer radiation treatment center in Poulsbo, possibly in a medical complex planned off Highway 305, just north of Poulsbo Village shopping center.

With radiation oncology services in North Kitsap, Kruse said, patients from the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas who otherwise would travel through Poulsbo to catch a ferry to Seattle would have the option of staying closer to home for treatment. The proposal is still in the talking stage and has not been reviewed by Harrison's board of directors, Kruse said.

Harrison also has ongoing conversations with Bainbridge Islanders about whether hospital services are warranted on the island. Some say yes, some say no.

"We're really emphasizing that we want to do something to support the physicians out there," Kruse said. "We're trying to be respectful. We don't want to spend not-for-profit money in a place that doesn't need us."

Projects being built or anticipated represent capital construction investments of $200 million, Kruse estimated, although

not all those costs are being borne by Harrison. The buildings in Port Orchard and Belfair will be occupied but not owned by Harrison.

With the physical expansions, the workforce of the nonprofit corporation, now numbering 2,300, will probably grow, Kruse said. He did not have an estimate of how much.

Harrison's story contrasts sharply with the mostly dour news elsewhere in the economy. Kruse said health care tends to be

insulated from roller coaster ups and downs because, with the exception of elective surgeries, people can't time their need for medical services — it happens when it happens.

Other medical providers in the region are also expanding.

Franciscan Health System, based in Tacoma, had six clinics six years ago; today, it has nearly 50, according to spokesman Gale Robinette. He said a clinic in Port Orchard, which opened in 2006, averages 1,200 patient visits each month.

Now Franciscan is building a new hospital in Gig Harbor. Called St. Anthony, the $160 million, 80-bed hospital is under construction on Canterwood Boulevard, just off Highway 16 and Burnham Drive. It's scheduled to open early next year.

Robinette said Franciscan considers its market area south Kitsap County as well as Pierce and south King counties. He said the organization's growth spurt is not slowing.

"This region is growing so much, and changing," he said "The projections for population growth generally is that it'll increase, and the population is getting older...

"Certainly, health care in the Puget Sound area is very competitive," he added. " ... You do watch what the competition is doing. You have to be aware and try to stay apace with the times and with your competitors."

Kruse said Harrison has noticed that Franciscan is "crawling all over the place with advertising" but brushed off the notion of St. Anthony as competition.

"How many people go to Gig Harbor for anything?" he said. "It's much more part of the Pierce and Tacoma market. Kitsap has its own preferences."

In Washington, approximately one-quarter to one-third of the nearly 100 hospitals in the state are undergoing significant

construction, Cassie Sauer, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Hospital Association, estimated.